It's no secret that virtually every blog out there has the ubiquitous 125 X 125 ad blocks, even me! But I've noticed that visitors don't tend to click much on them. In this day and age when advertisers demand to know how much ROI they can expect on their ad spending this could have a HUGE impact on your blogs monetization strategies.
Here are 5 ways that you can combat ad blindness on your blog -
- Rotate your ads - Download this plugin to automate your ads being rotated every time a page on your blog is loaded. If you find that visitors tend to click, come back, reload and visit other pages on your blog they will see a new placement each and every single time. Provided you do not have wp-cache installed.
- Use a different format -There are more formats than just 125 size ads. You can display 120 X 240 ads or use a randomizer plugin to show bigger 300 X 250 each time a page is refreshed. You need to keep experimenting and changing, kind of like how you wear a different tee over the same jeans everyday to get a whole new look.
- Don't show ads - Yep, as drastic as it may sound you are probably better off not showing any "graphical" ads. I have a skyrocketing CTR on my affiliate "text" links within posts all over this blog. Give it a try, only make sure that whatever you are linking to is relevant, and don't over do it please. That just negates your effort.
- Ad free days - I'm going to take off all my graphical ads for the next two days, not text links. I figure if people see a clean blog they might stay longer and probably click on the right affiliate text link, or better yet actually subscribe to my blog and become regular readers. That would be worth much more than a couple of bucks. So when you do turn your ads back on you've already won over a new audience. You can always sell to them later.
- Get a designer - If the ads on your blog suck, I'm talking about affiliate banners, then you need to get some custom designed banners. You can find a lot on freelance job websites, forums etc...Try some different formats than non-industry standard and have some fun.
Give some of these tips a try and figure out what works best for you. Let me know how it goes, I would love to do case studies.
Community Question: How often do you click on an ad on blogs you regularly visit? Comment on this post to answer.
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John Chow started with a lot of ads placing on his blog and everyone copied it. I’m no exception lol
I don’t really mind ads as long as they don’t get in the way. I came to some sites, which has auto play video ads now, i couldn’t get out of there fast enough
I don’t mind as long as they are relevant to the page that I am on, and does not float over the page, or expand or anything like that.
I have a few as well on my blogs. At the moment they are fledgling blogs. I try to place them and utilize them by viewing from a readers perspective and whether they detract from what I am posting.